Eager beaver, no. 38.

I was really eager to get my laptop onto the branch that will become Fedora 15. A recently uncovered bug (possibly in glibc), along with another unrelated problem (in pygobject?), are preventing installs via the nightly composed ISO images of the pre-release. So if you’re on Fedora 14, and want to get on the new branch, you could do this:

1. Back up your data and at least your /etc directory. You never know what you might wish you’d kept!
2. Also run the following command to save the names of your installed packages: rpm -qa –qf ‘%{NAME}\n’ > /home/rpmnames-old.txt
3. Download the Fedora 15 Alpha release, Desktop Live spin, in your choice of 32- or 64-bit, and install. In a moment you’ll update everything.
4. After you start up and run through the normal setups, don’t bother logging in at the GUI yet. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to a text terminal. Login as root, or else use sudo with the following commands.
5. Install any -release type repository RPMs you may want. I keep copies of these hanging around for just such occasions.
6. Get the names of the newly installed packages: rpm -qa –qf ‘%{NAME}\n’ > /home/rpmnames-new.txt
7. Run: yum –skip-broken install `diff -u /home/rpmnames-old.txt /home/rpmnames-new.txt | tail -n +4 | grep ‘^-‘ | cut -c 2-`

Note this is not a perfect solution. Releases change, and some packages may not be available in the new release that were in the old one. You may want to rerun steps 6 and 7 a couple days later if there are any broken dependencies that foil you from installing everything you wanted. Or alternately, you might want to stick in a step 6.5, which runs a few yum groupinstall commands to make step 7 shorter. This isn’t a panacea, it’s just a quick way to get up and running if you want to try out the new hotness but are stymied by the bugs listed above.

And of course, you could just download the entire Alpha DVD and point it at  so you won’t have to twiddle as much afterward; quite a few services that run by default in a DVD install, like sshd, aren’t necessarily enabled by default in an installation from the Live image. The above is just a quick way to get started if you know you’ll be doing further installation testing or other hackery later anyway. And it will give you a good flavor for the awesome new GNOME environment.

What if you want recapture your user account and password? Just refer back to your backup you made. Do not simply restore it over the new /etc files. You could really get hosed that way. Instead do something like this. I’m going to assume you only have a couple of users on your system, starting with userid 500 per normal:

mkdir /tmp/restore && cd /tmp/restore
tar xf /path/to/etc-backup.tar.gz   # Got backup?
for i in $(grep ':50[0-9]:' etc/passwd | cut -d: -f1); do
  for f in passwd shadow group gshadow; do
    grep ^$i etc/$f >> /etc/$f
  done
done

Here’s something I also recommend: move your user’s ~/.gconf directory to a backup before you login the first time. Try the spiffy new GNOME 3 out in its default settings. If you need to tweak or restore, you still have the old settings to which you can refer. But it’s worth trying everything as it was intended out of the box. I’m totally excited to run the pre-release so I can rock the new GNOME Shell. Pretty soon I’ll start working on a new branch of PulseCaster that will use the new PyGObject available in Fedora 15, and maybe a few of the cool new GTK+ 3 bits I’ve seen might be helpful in the  new UI.

Enjoy!